"Even more low-key, and in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, which is comfortable, restrained, and quietly eccentric. Jazz in the background, a few excellent cocktails...and Del Pedro behind the bar..." Read more.
"Thank God the developers haven't yet discovered the Saloon in the basement of Grand Central Station. It's hiding behind the Oyster Bar -- don't tell anyone." Read more.
"A lot of people hate the Rose Bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel. It's expensive, the decor is contrived, you have to make a reservation to get in after 9:00 p.m. What detractors fail to appreciate..." Read more.
"situated in a 185-year-old building at the southern tip of Manhattan. The Dead Rabbit is not low-key; it's insane—so geeky and so history-obsessed that by all rights it should be an impossible..." Read more.
"If they gentrified the old brick section of heaven, the Brooklyn Inn would be the neighborhood bar." Read more.
"Trim, neat, and exceptionally friendly, this well-liked establishment has a small but useful dinner menu, a reasonably priced wine list with an excellent array of sherries, and—the reason it's..." Read more.
"New York hotels used to be famous for their bars—elegant places where the chemists behind the stick took pride in their mastery. That changed. In recent decades, they've become overdecorated..." Read more.
"It has been there since the 1870s and has the memorabilia to prove it. And if you don't like to read, they also carry about 200-odd single malts." Read more.
"This isolated cocktail bar is attached to a Japanese restaurant but entirely separate from it. It's dark and quiet and has an impressive selection of whiskeys. They don't seat groups larger than..." Read more.
"A few shelves of Irish whiskeys, one of the better pints of Guinness in the city, friendly but not naive bartenders, addictive sliders, various dark, churchy seating areas, and a good crowd..." Read more.
"A half dozen carefully selected drafts. One rotating cask ale, always fresh. Belgian beers divided into Flemish, Wallonian, and lambic styles. Cheese and charcuterie on a cutting board. There's..." Read more.
"The world has seen no stranger political entity than the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which united at least ten different nationalities who cordially hated one another and agreed on one thing and one..." Read more.
"Pouring Ribbons, in a rather unlikely upstairs space in the deep East Village, is a paradise for the unashamed cocktail geek: spectacularly sophisticated, adventurous modern drinks in the classic..." Read more.
"From 1800 until approximately the Nixon era, it was universally acknowledged that the best bars in the world were found in New York hotels--the old Waldorf-Astoria, the Metropolitan, the New York..." Read more.
"Once you get past the slightly gimmicky name (PDT = Please Don’t Tell) and the more than slightly gimmicky phone-booth entrance, this cocktail bar that requires table reservations is the epitome..." Read more.
"First time I went to P.J. Clarke's, oh, hell, a few years ago now, I was drunk at the bar with a bunch of friends and we turned to watch this old dude with a golden cigar tube poking out of his..." Read more.
"Lower Manhattan once had dozens of bars like this--gruff joints where you could sink a couple of beers and a whiskey or two alongside the regulars without fear of harassment as long as you kept..." Read more.
"The streets outside Minetta Tavern are crawling with NYU students, but they never go in this former speakeasy in the heart of Greenwich Village. Probably because it's too old, too comfortable, too.." Read more.
"Used to be, a nightclub was a dark, smoky place where well-dressed people sipped well-made drinks and made clever, well-educated chitchat while a hot Cuban band played rumbas. Little Branch does..." Read more.
"Sure, it's a gay bar, but this dingy, loose-hinged old survivor is still more masculine than 90 percent of the straight bars in America. If Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams were drinking..." Read more.
This place is a classic, impossibly narrow New York bar and one of the few places that remain from pretransformation Times Square. Boxing posters and Christmas lights: a perfect place." Read more.
"Nobody knows Grassroots is there, but it's always full. Three reasons: beer, darts, conversation. And enough gloom to keep the NYU students from making it a 'college bar.'" Read more.
"...where the taps work, and there's more than one grade of booze. By local standards, that makes it a palace--although if it were a real palace, its own inhabitants would be plotting its overthrow." Read more.
"Go for the cocktails -- we like the manhattan. They're some of the very best in the country." Read more.
"With Clover Club, the modern cocktail bar enters its next generation, the one that does everything good the previous one did, but without waving its arms around and shouting 'Hey, lookit me!'..." Read more.
"The name is accurate, as far as it goes: There are indeed many, many cognacs, Armagnacs, brandies de Jerez, and other fine grape and fruit distillates, all ranked on shelves like so many..." Read more.
"Also in the East Village, it harnesses the power of lab science in the interest of intoxication, deploying processes such as pressure infusion, vacuum distillation, centrifuge separation..." Read more.
"Attached to this little bar--manned by a bartender so closemouthed that some think he's kidding--is a high stone wall surrounding half an acre of gravel punctuated by rows of century-old trees..." Read more.
"It's a former speakeasy where you still feel as though you're getting away with something. Even in midtown." Read more.
"Ten or fifteen years ago, it was hard to get a decent drink in New York, particularly if you wanted anything other than a martini. Back then, my wife and I, unburdened by offspring or daytime jobs.." Read more.
"Long before That ‘70s Show was a show, it was, in fact, my life. (Just substitute central Indiana for Wisconsin.) So you can imagine how pleased I was upon the opening of Barcade, a cavernous..." Read more.
"This tiny, candle-lit, boho bar and performance space in Park Slope, Brooklyn, is an Anti-Dive. There are competent barmen who know the extensive wine and spirits list, smart conversations, and..." Read more.
"Once you master the dress code and navigate the gantlet of staff members by the door whose sole purpose seems to be to keep the riffraff out by making them--you--feel like an eighth-grader at a..." Read more.
